I never write about music because I know that it bores the arse off most people. I am probably making a mistake posting this video.
The woman sings in a wobbly voice and the images look like a combination of the Old Spice and Guinness commercials. However, the music itself is wonderful. Sibelius wrote 'tone poems' that that sounded as if they were crafted from the four elements and this piece, Luonnotar, is one of his finest:
Oooh, that's fabulous.
ReplyDeleteI know bugger all about classical music and I'm currently trying to educate myself. My dad loved Sibelius and so I'm seeking it out whenever I can. This is a nice new way of making sure that I'll listen to it!
Yeah, my life at seventeen wasn't that dissimilar although I was more into the Russians rather than the Scandinavians. Since I've grown up I'm trying to expand my knowledge of composers from this neck of the woods and I have some Svendsen, Berwald and Rautavaara as well as some of the Baltic composers like Tüür, Pärt, Sumera and Vasks. That said I still have all Sibelius's symphonies.
ReplyDeleteOh, and write about music all you like.
Was kissing lots of boys, and girls, at 17, but still love the music, and the music posts.
ReplyDeleteI don't have sound on my PC at the moment, but I do enjoy Sibelius. Music is such a fundamental, elemental, spiritual, personal and universal thing I'm fascinated by the way it can trigger emotional responses from us. But there's just so much to say it's hard to even make a dent in it, so I'll use this instead -
I had a friend and the characteristic of our friendship was that we never stopped talking and frequently had 3, 4, 6 hour conversations moving from room to room in the house. One day he said, "Listen to this, you might like it" and put on Spiegel im Spiegel. There were a few minutes of total absolute silence apart from the music, stunned quiet tears, and afterwards there was an added dimension of silence to the friendship.
So that now when we are not speaking (still very rare) there is proper deep, quality, restful, refreshing silence, not just not sound.
Love Part, Mahler, Brahms in particular.
Thanks for your kind words. It's good to know that there are others out there who respond to this music.
ReplyDeleteIf I had a choice between saving my books or Sibelius recordings, I'd have trouble deciding.
There is something about Sibelius's music that, at its best, says more about the human condition than anything I've read. I like the way music can bypass the rational, language-based parts of the brain and connect directly with the subconscious.